this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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If anybody still doesn't understand, when the wave function collapses, that is called observation. Again, from Wikipedia:
Physics has this problem with naming things. They use words like "particle", "observation", and "spin", among others, which are words that every English speaker knows, but then they use those words to describe stuff that's actually only similar to the words everybody knows. This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.
My favorite example of this is the use of "stress" and "strain". In common language they're synonyms, but in Physics they're definitely not.
In general, I agree, but spin is quite surprising in how much like angular momentum and dynamos it behaves. Either way, we don't know enough about it yet, and it's at best a coincidence.
Shout-out to floatheadphysics (Mahesh) for his video on spin. The way he steps through the learning process like it's a conversation with the giants that gave us the knowledge (based on their writings) and how he presents it with all the excitement of "getting it" is cathartic.
"Theory" is another bad one in all of science. That's what leads knuckleheads to saying dumb shit like "evolution is just a theory!"
There isn't a scientific definition for "observation." In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article "Against 'Measurement'", that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to "observation" or "measurement" which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just "when the wavefunction collapses" is a circular definition and doesn't answer anything, because then we can just ask, "when does the wavefunction collapse?" and the only answer the textbook axioms give is "when you observe/measure it."